A Bit on Politics

...because it's my specialty.

So anyway, as I mentioned before, the ANC has held power since 1994. Lovely stuff. Until Mandela stepped down.

Mandela's successor was Thabo Mbeki, who had been living in exile during apartheid and had been in contact with the underground movement only by radio. That said, Mbeki's presidency was seen as a bit aloof and out of touch with the people, as he relied not on contact with popular opinion but on a close circle of advisers.

That's all well and good, as long as the advisers are willing to criticize you. Not the case with Mbeki.

South Africa uses a parliamentary system with proportional representation, which means that voters vote for parties, not individuals, and the amount of votes a party receives determines the number of seats that party will have. Also being parliamentary, the dominant party selects the president.

In broad strokes, this means that political parties wield much more power than they would back home. As both the president of South Africa and the leader of the ANC, Mbeki had the power to destroy people's political careers overnight. This meant that his aides were usually too afraid to disagree with him.

I'm sure he never looked this friendly in private.

Mbeki was an AIDS denialist: he questioned the link between the HIV virus and AIDS. Furthermore, he refused to distribute antiretroviral drugs as part of national healthcare, which, it is estimated, led to the premature deaths of 200,000 HIV-positive South Africans. His health minister, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, suggested that HIV-positive patients treat their illnesses with herbal remedies rather than take prescription drugs, which was the subject of international ridicule.

Corruption and privilege also increased under Mbeki:a recent court case decided that political parties in South Africa are private organizations and do not need to publicly disclose their funding sources. As you can expect, the amount of rent-seeking is out of control. Big businesses invest hundreds of millions of rand a year to gain favorable benefits from the South African government, or to avoid harmful measures against businesses. Although well-exposed in the US, this problem is a bit of a recent phenomenon in South Africa and has not been properly analyzed yet. If you're interested in rent-seeking, there's plenty of good literature published in America on the subject.

I'm pretty sure this stuff is genetic.

Much in the Russian tradition, a few entrepreneurial individuals with good connections can get unbelievably wealthy fast, and enjoy protective relations from the national government as well. I wrote about this phenomenon a couple months ago: http://groups.northwestern.edu/njia/?p=636

Corruption is also a problem with the ANC: under Mbeki, party loyalty was much better rewarded than qualifications or honesty. When Andrew Feinstein, the chairman of the public accounts committee in South Africa, called for an inquest into the misuse of state funds in the notorious South African Arms Deal, he was removed from his position and replaced. Organ transplants are costly here, with the waiting list sometimes overwhelmed with a 6-month backlog. Nevertheless, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang (the health minister) was able to bump herself to the top of the list for not one but two liver transplants, having drank her way through the one she was born with. Incidentally, she died two years ago from complications of chronic alcoholism.

Thabo Mbeki was eventually replaced by Jacob Zuma, who, despite being a bit more of a populist than his predecessor, still has done nothing to address the levels of corruption (he himself has been the subject of a corruption trial that has been delayed more than 30 times). Furthermore, during his rape trial in 2005, Zuma certified that he had known that the alleged victim was HIV-positive, but that he had taken a shower afterwards to reduce the risk of infection. In a country in which people are only just starting to believe that condoms are the only reliable way to prevent HIV, this was not particularly well-received.

I'm concentrating on the negative again. The positives of Mbeki's precidency are that the man was much more economically neoliberal than either his predecessor or his successor, and that thanks to his fairly laissez-faire policies South Africa's economy grew at 5% annually until 2008; Mbeki's term also oversaw the birth of the black middle class. Austerity measures put in place by Mbeki have also insulated the country quite well against the global credit crisis.

So yeah, here we are. Zuma is president, unemployment is 45% (as and high as 90% in some areas I've already been to), and economic relations are deepening between China and South Africa. But hey, it could be so much worse (as it is in some parts of the world).

Hey, remember that bailout that was going to save us all?